So in the past I've tried blogging editorials, coverage, top 5's etc. but now it's time for a bit of a rant. So I invite you to join me for what will quite possibly be my angriest blog post yet.

Brink is an upcoming FPS in development by Splash Damage here in the UK. Player customisation is being touted as a key feature with players able to customise their character down to fine details... oh, as long as they choose a man. There are no playable women in the game. In fact as far as I know there are no women in the game, at all. I'm sorry is this 1845?

I'll be honest, I'm annoyed. I think it's appalling that in 2011 a high profile computer game can come out and actually sound off about player choice and then limit everyone to a single gender. If everyone was made to play as a woman I wouldn't be as annoyed as I am. This may seem like a double standard but I'll explain my point of view:

The games industry has been sexist for years. Other people have done very good blog posts about this topic so I won't go into it and tread over their ground but the fact that women are not represented properly in computer games (or treated with respect as fans either but that's another topic entirely) is a complete and utter embarrassment. Things have been improving in recent years with high profile games like Halo offering the ability to play either gender. However the fact that I can even point to that as a high point and not have it be the norm is ludicrous. But at the end of the day, things are thankfully steadily becoming equal. So basically, a game like Brink is just a big lazy step backwards and that irritates me.

Are the developers sexist? Crazy? Lazy? Let's investigate.

Brink was announced in May of 2009. The title was actually sneakily discovered two weeks earlier thanks to Zenimax filing a trademark for the name. The announcement came in the form of a teaser trailer just prior to E3. Here it is below:

Not a terrible teaser but nothing extremely noteworthy either. Anyway, if we continue along the timeline Brink was next shown at E3 in a hands-off demo. The first time the public got to see the game running in action. This is when we learnt what Brink was really about, it promoted choice and freedom over rigid linear gameplay.

2009 continued with the occasional glimpses of the game and here's where it became apparent that there would be no playable female characters. In December the developers directly addressed the issue on the game's own forum:

“I’d love to see female characters in Brink too – I think we all would! In fact, we did explore female characters in our early concept art”

Okay so they at least thought about it. What happened next?

“However, given the realities of development, we had a choice between having a wide range of options for male characters, or a much more limited set of clothing options that allow for both genders.”

That's it? I'm sorry but to me that is one poor excuse. But wait, they had more to say:

Yeah...so? It's extra work, of course it is. Adding anything to a game is extra work, that doesn't make a very compelling argument for leaving it out when it's such a basic important feature. Finally here's the last quote, it's my favourite of the bunch:

“One of the only things we really found challenging about fitting female characters into Brink’s gameplay proper is that in order for gameplay to be balanced, the females would have to be roughly the same height and width as the male characters in order to prevent any issues with hit detection or visibility. Since women naturally tend to be smaller than men in reality, it meant we had to be pretty exaggerated in terms of their proportions when concepting the early designs. It actually worked fairly well in the end but it was a lot more work than getting the males to look right at the same size.”

So again, what I get from that is basically it was more work so they backed off. But what gets my attention there is that they had a problem making the characters the same height? Recently a new trailer for Brink came out, let's take a look at the guy right at the start of it.

Look at his neck! Correct me if I'm wrong but “in reality” people don't quite look like that. There's nothing realistic about that at, or anyone in that trailer for that matter. Brink has a stylised art style but from everything I've seen they have no reservations about really pushing the boundaries of realism so I can't fathom at all how height is a valid excuse. If the men can be varied enough but all be immune from this issue then doesn't it negate that as a reason?

So really at the end of the day all I'm hearing for the reason is that they didn't want to put the time into it. Even if the game was under a very tight schedule I'd struggle to listen to that without rolling my eyes but the game is just coming up to being a year overdue and has only just finally been given a new release date. So in all that time the developers really didn't have the time to add women to the game? I don't buy it. Also it's worth noting that it's Bethesda/ZeniMax handling publishing which is a privately owned company meaning there's much less pressure to get the game released at a specific time compared to public companies like EA.

There are other cases of this occurring but Brink has caught my attention because of it's focus on customisation. It's hypocritical to proclaim a game to have layers and layers of personalisation but then lack more than one gender. APB had a similar disappointment since it happily marketed itself as another game with deep character creation options but failed to mention how female characters barely had anywhere close to the choices that males had. But here comes Brink with absolutely no options to play a woman whatsoever! It just boggles my mind that this can happen in 2011.

You can make your own judgements from the evidence but I believe they made a very poor choice and if they dedicated themselves to representing both genders, as they should have, they could have done it.

CLOSING COMMENTS: I am very curious to hear where you stand on this. Maybe you think I'm full of crap and the developers are justified in their choice. Maybe you don't think this is a big deal at all. Or maybe you even agree with me. Whatever you think, please leave a comment and let me know.